Let’s go to the point. I already had occasion to express my personal distance from Mr. Berlusconi. I had also expressed, though, my ‘necessary vicinity’ to figure of the Prime Minister of Italy. The scission between the two things is as crucial as basic, for anyone interested in filling his own mouth with big words such as ‘democracy’ (in western sauce).
That is why I can certainly understand any critic over the person (indeed, sometimes clownish), yet I become way more rigid when the critic-virus extends to the Institution he represents, the Government of Italy in general and, by further syncopated extension, to ‘the Italians’. Because, in the end, ‘they are like him’ or, invariably, ‘they elected him’.
The former account is not true; the latter, a failed syllogism.

As Italian, at some point I got a little sick of this constant light (when not heavy indeed) international press reprimanding from our glorious international neighbors. Sickness becomes real annoyance, then, when even supposedly professional figures seem to base their analyses on extemporaneous mixes of third-hand hearsays and prejudices more than on coherent set of information and some proper research on the subject.
Instead of receiving some journalism I’m often left with the impression I’m reading a smattering of CIA’s world factbook seasoned with some villain’s protesting for anything – as if it is hard to find villains protesting for something convenient to any thesis (or simply eager to hit the news).

Ever more often, reading international news on Italy (or having dinner with friends from abroad), looks like a trial, as an Italian, because of what my PM does or says – or, worse, for how he does or says anything.
Here is, then, the erroneous synecdoche: since my PM is a debatable person then, by extension, so are Italy and the Italians, in a vicious circle that sees the person phenomenally contaminating the whole country, people and institutions.
Way worse, if you do not associate to the reprimanding chorus then you’re automatically disqualified, classified as a ‘Belusconian’, your word losing weight because tolerating the ‘elsewhere’ intolerable.
It is that ‘elsewhere intolerable’, though, that does not convince me, at all.
The vicious circle, in fact, might be also somewhere else.
I believe such an unpleasant confusion of terms and concepts derived by ignorance, and creating more. A soft-crime, the most evident sign of the loss of the conceptual divide between information and (superficial) opinion, perpetrated by nowadays media for the sake of filling columns or air-time.

The latest international remarks on Italy – and their effect on the international crowds – appear to go exactly in this direction.
Probably, the time for an answer has come.
The Italian Government ridiculous? Fine.
Before attacking a PM of any country, though, you might want to drop a glimpse at that one of your own – and those who came some time before.
Let’s not talk about politics, democracy, western values or other big paraphernalia. Let’s just remain on more cosmetic and immediate considerations.
Thus, instead of providing for justifications (which, anyway, I wouldn’t have many) to counter the alleged deficiencies of the Italian PM, his unfitness to drive the country, or reply to the idiotic consideration that he might set a dangerous precedent for any other government in Europe, let’s have a look to a few neighboring excellent Heads.
In the try to remind, to everyone, that after all we’re all on the same boat.
And to offer a different perspective, for once.

How not to start with the almighty France. Their hyper-president, half-Hungarian and half Greek (not that this would imply anything, were we not to be talking about France), at the age of 54 has three marriages on his shoulders – the ‘making of’ of the last of which (with an Italian singer) has been one of the two main subjects of his electoral campaign. So much for talking about being scared of foreigners. His agenda of ‘rupture’ – the other main subject – two years after the hyper-government started, lays probably somewhere off in a forgotten drawer, stopped by cab-drivers in riots, Parisian suburbs in riot (and fire), students in riot, professors in riots, public employees in riot, and I don’t continue because I got a word-limit here. The Mr. Attali ‘Commission for the French Growth’, prompted as the battering ram of the new French economical revolution, is listened less than the Cuma’s Sybil, any of its proposals now looked with more apprehension than expectation by both the French people and its Government.
To wrap up: he’s not ‘French’, he’s far from being a family-model, he’s certainly not a model for discretion and understatement (CBS interview-case docet), he’s not really pushing the French growth at the supersonic level he promised.
Anyway, no one thinks France today might ‘weight less’ or its institutions less valuable because of Mr. Sarkozy. Nor anyone would associate Sarkò’s pathetic Napoleonic stance (political, stance) and debatable public behaviors to the French people.
The rive gauche may still snobbishly refer to him as the ‘Hungarian-dwarf’, yet you’re left wondering how much the majority of the French may have detested the idea to have a woman at the Élysée to prefer this in lieu of her. So much for talking about a modern country, the ‘driving civilization of Europe’. Going with this reasoning, the only way to imagine Mrs. Royal winning the past election is for her to have had a gay opponent.
In fact, today Sarkò may appear losing some consensus, yet the Parisians (hence, the French) are over-bending for his conservative party, whose advantage over the socialists is calculated in more than 10 points.

Let’s move to a more ironic case, Spain. This baby has been breast-fed for two decades with floods of cash by the three main contributors of the Union (i.e., Germany, France and Italy). As a thank you note, its current Prime Minister, a little boyishly, declared some day last year that Spain had overreached Italy on per-capita GDP, with France being next target. Some days after, he had to admit the loss of over 70.000 jobs in a week. Today, the unemployment rate of this country has soared back to 18% – a figure which, in Europe, is comparable only to post-bombing Serbia. Perhaps time has come, for Mr. Zapatero, to focus a little less on childish ‘who has it harder’ among European colleagues, stop trying to propose its social legislation as a model for the entire Union – being that de facto annulled by the mayors of two-thirds of the Country, conveniently Catholic and dreadfully corrupted – and start realizing that, given the new alleged wealth, no more money is coming from Europe to let him keep living the dream of a richer Spain.
In any case, no one thinks that having a preposterous Prime Minister apparently overwhelmed by complexes and whose economical failure is the most consistent and endangering of the continent has diminished the credibility of the Spanish institutions. Nor anyone would associate Mr. Zapatero to a typical Spaniard.

Next: the United Kingdom. The situation here is actually so bleak one is tempted not to stitch the knife on its Government. Yet, it may be worth recalling that Mr. Brown’s consensus is already the ‘longest lowest’ of the whole Western hemisphere since tracking of consensus started, ranking worldwide just next to Mr. Olmert and Mr. Koizumi. He governs since June 2007 without actually having been elected and he postponed the next poll up to June 2010, in order to ‘show his vision for change’. No matter how the British elections mechanism works, from this standpoint it looks debatable enough – and the real reasons behind the poll’s delay, debatable even more. However, no one would ever think Mr. Brown as an unelected dictator, his try to postpone the elections year after year as an attempt to the British democracy.

Of course, one could spend also a couple of words on Bulgary, republican-ly governed by the pretender to its throne; Greece, whose politicians have lied for almost a decade on the economical figures of the country in order to accede to the Euro-zone; Austria, whose disastrous results of year 2000 elections were to bring a neo-Nazi to Vienna’s Chancellory (if it wasn’t for an unusually bald ostracism of the European partners); or the Czech’s President, the current diplomatic disgrace at the rudder of the European Presidency.

However unfit they might appear, these leaders are not automatically considered to represent projections of all their citizens, or an ideal image of them. They simply represent their countries, and their populations, as a natural consequence of the democratic system in which they live and that allowed their election. Everyone feels free to criticize them, right because the critic goes to the person, not to the institution they represent.
No one would ever think to accuse, because of the behavior of their political leaders, the Greeks to be all liars, the Austrians neo-Nazis, the Spanish full of complexes or the French retrogrades to the unimaginable.

Unfortunately, for Italy, the attitude of the international press shows remarkably stricter (and syncopated) standards, the gestures of Mr. Berlusconi not only – and rightfully – severely stigmatized, but – very wrongly – considered as ‘typically Italian’, improperly creating an association which at best is only very partially true.

Shall I say that sometimes is best to have a look at the mirror first?

The case for Kosovo and the Serbs does not make an exception to the rule.
The first to be blamed are the same Serbs, of course. The antipathy they have been able to generate all over the world is impressive. Their reputation might not have been that high anytime (because of a critically complex history) but they now officially represent the only case of internationally-prosecuted State in the world, as far as I can tell.
First, Germany and the Vatican (urged by blatantly personal interests), recognized the new Slovenia and Croatia entities in the first 90’, sealing the end of the Yugoslavian-state era over quarrels that perhaps could have been managed differently by the same Slavs. Then, the creation of the fake-state of Bosnia-Herzegovina – decreed elsewhere abroad – swiped out another piece of Serbia (now an autonomous state called ‘Republic of Serbia’ within the Bosnian federation). Then, because of a disastrous leader and a disgraceful political class, they get bombed by NATO. Soon after, they lose control of another piece of their country, the – unlikely to be created – Kosovo province, put under the joint administration of UN and EU. In the end, they’re now forced to accept the total loss of that piece of land instead of the loose control & territorial unity recipe they proposed.

The reasons for the doggedness international institutions keep serving such sour dishes to the Serbian people (enhancing the historical sense of victimization they feel since the Turks domination) is given by a variety of factors. All of those, though, may be driven back to a single element.
Serbs have always had – or, as they say, they have been perceived as if they had – a peculiar sense of territorial possession over the Balkans. The myth of the ‘Greater Serbia’, in various declinations, has been generated and nourished all over the last couple of centuries. This conception got well along the idea of unity of the southern Slavs (that’s what the word Yugoslavia meant) Croatians, Montenegrins and – to a lesser extent – Slovenes shared either. Not that Serbs hadn’t any reason to believe they should be the driving force of the process (and of the system created thereafter). It is true that among the cultures there around (excluding the Magyars, which are a per se case) Serbian can be easily recognized as the ‘master’ of the region. Tightened between catholic Austria and islamic Turkey, they have been able to develop an impressive array of arts and literature, always devoted to their own Orthodox Church. Beside the fact that Serbians always have been far more numerous than their neighbours, Belgrade is, still nowadays, the only relevant capital of the area. The Serbian language (actually a double-alphabet system, using both Latin and Cyrillic) is the stool on which the neighbours grafted their dialects in the time. It is only apparently superficial to say that the only concrete difference between a Serbian and a Croatian* or a Montenegrin is that the first is orthodox, the others are catholic – still, they’re all Christians.

Hence, because of their history, Serbs tend to see themselves as the local godfathers, the historical ‘holders of the keys’ of the region. The more the thing is evident (and mostly true), the more all the others react evidencing the differences (and what of that is not true).
Serbs never actually intended to annihilate the culture, the traditions and the specificities of the other Slavic groups, part of the ex-Yugoslavia. What they needed, as a true psychological need after centuries of being at the frontiers of Europe – in their vision, defending it from the muslims invaders, or at least not allowing them to go further north (most of the time) -, was to see recognized their role of ‘guardians of Europe’ from the rest of the world (or at least from Europe) and, from the Slavic colleagues, their position of master of the region.
such psychological need has always obtained quite cold answers. The total lack of diplomatic skills – quite typical of all the Slavs – turned to show Serbians as arrogant and despotic, unable to manage a state that – all of a sudden – was internationally acknowledged as a ‘multi-ethnic’ state (which Yugoslavia never was: there were all and just Slavs).
Under their perspective, Serbs had a sincerely hard time trying to understand why they got so much international attention when they decided not to respect an internal pact of succession for the presidency of the Yugoslavian federation and then refuse to accept the dissolution of the nation: in the end, Tito was Croatian, and he was on charge for 35 years, why the hell should they not try to force a little the things and recompose the breaking puzzle, even with some military suggestions?

Here we are, with the perfect recipe on how to lose pieces of your country at a very fast pace.
Serbians pay not only the bills they accumulated on their own (effectively undeniable, even if to a lesser extent than generally thought). They pay also for the bills left open by Yugoslavia to the world, before suddenly dying hit by a lightening heart attack. Of course, for the bad news you always need a scapegoat. Since you’re the biggest, here we are, recognizing you, now, the master’s role.
I know, it wasn’t exactly what you meant when aspiring to that recognition.

*Though, right now a young Croatian can’t understand that easily a Serbian. The linguistic ‘diversification process’ enacted by the Croatian governments during the last decade is shocking, in its effort to differentiate what is basically non-differentiable. Still, it’s hard to believe that where you had a single nation with a common language for about 40 million people, now exist a number of city-states all of them claiming to have (and to always have had) their own unique language.

A consistent contribution to such geographical mistiness lays right in the genetic and the history of the Russian people and their capital. In fact, even if placed way eastern than the ex-Roman-Imperial-seat, Moscow always considered itself part of the European space and culture – thanks also to the vast chunks of territory held eastward (and south) of it. Not far from its sight, ethnic traits may vary and believes change, yet the Russian capital was European (and Christian), those further east being eventually not much more than inferiors to be subjugated*.
Placed somewhere the idea of Europe had not yet arrived and that one of Asia was probably better to be left in nomadic remembers, Moscow and the Russians decided to be part of the ‘west’ of the world**, their reference being from that moment the old Roman capitals as well as the ‘new’ European tigers (namely, Paris and Vienna).
In turn, eastward of Moscow European maps symbolically placed a dispassionate hic sunt leones label for many centuries, not really caring of what there could be east out there (probably assumed too cold anyway).

The stretch between western choice and eastern geography and origin consequently determined the development of an authentic frame of mind and culture of unmatched complexity – sometimes apparently schizophrenic.
Take the language, for instance. Too far from an effective influence of old Latin linguistic rules and declinations, these have been processed in a way similar to the German language. Yet, rather than German-style sticking with the rules, here rules have been taken as simple references for words which – all – became exceptions, written in a different and more extensive alphabet whose canons of pronunciations are rather obscure – to a good share of natives, too.
It does not surprise (too much) that such impressively sophisticated minds, despite numerically insignificant, have been able – case unique in the history – to achieve and retain control of over one/eight of the world’s surface.

Indeed, hardly deniable elements such as distinctive chauvinism, marked xenophobia, a certain inclination for quite drastic methods of disputes resolution and the inner desire of supremacy that still today characterize the Russian society at many different levels played their part in this success, essentially contributing to the progressive subjugation of cultures and populations rather modest (where not nomadic), while trying to achieve the dream of a single dominion spanning from the Pacific Ocean to the Mediterranean Sea – and eventually dipping in the Indian Ocean, too.

How to explain such a contradictory picture within a society that has already centuries of history on his back – and thus would be supposed to have processed and diluted (whether not resolved) its opposing elements? How to reconcile Muscovite nowadays lust and hyper development or Saint Petersburg’s luxury with, say, roads that just outside Moscow’s 10 lanes drives need a solid old-style Land Rover to be crossed? Or what about the disastrous living conditions that bond a stunning majority of the Russian population, from Moscow’s suburbs to the Pacific coast? And how to describe what happened just a few months ago, when the world assisted to something a large part of it probably assumed as definitely buried in books of history*** – a war on the European soil?

Mostly because of its polyedric facets, to western minds Russia keeps appearing a sort of permanently drunk and ill-fat bear. An edgy creature able of occasional good gestures – normally flooded in paternalistic sauce – as shocking turnarounds whose rationale can perhaps be found more easily in a nursery than in studies of international relations.
Too big, too rich – and simultaneously too poor -, too prone to machinations and, when these don’t work, too aggressive in its reactions, Russia’s behavior may often look not far from that of a clumsy elephant in the western crystal-equilibriums of relations and power.

Today, the old Russian giant, despite ‘minimized’ in its territorial ambitions with the collapse of its last Empire in communist sauce, after a decade of world-derision while struggling not to fall into bankruptcy, not to lose more pieces and not to explode at some point – given the ruinous conditions of part of its nuclear arsenal –, it looks having decided to follow the last chance destiny provided it to ransom its debatable history after Catherina the Great by not spreading the wealth given by its immense and inestimable resources. Astoundingly, instead, it seems concentrated in the effort to restore the -supposed- magnificence of its Great Power.

Dressing melons with dijonnaise, the new recipe aims to reconcile the irreconcilable, through ambiguous recalls to those ‘great’ remembers whose only merit is to have shaped Russia’s nowadays clay feet. By one side we thus have a new magnificat of the worst imperial ‘autocracy’ (terms per se outlandish enough) that ever touched Europe, by the other the unbury of the myth of the Soviet Power – in the rest of the world cynically considered less disastrous than Nazism just because it has never troubled or invaded any State that really mattered in Europe. Happy synthesis of the previous is then the sudden glorification of this Putin-guy, Magnus Artifex of Russia’s new dignity.

Of course, no one contends Russia’s right to (try to) draw a coherent picture of its own history.
What generates perplexities is that, after the communist-block-parenthesis, Russia still maintains towards the West an unnatural opposition, in the new try to prove itself something that is not east, nor west, but just something big enough to be self-sufficient. Such self-portrait, of course, convince only Russia’s establishment, leaving the ‘West’ appalled, the ‘East’ (i.e., China) eager to take advantage of such an illusion and the ‘South’ (i.e., the ex-Soviet satellites) rather scared, being the only area Russia can still effectively bossy.

You really don’t have to be Napoleon to realize that to fulfill such an ‘alternative’ project you might need the troops to do that.
Tightened between a Union of 500millions people and a new Empire of 1.3billion, in semi-permanent crisis with the 300millions Super-Power, Russia’s scarce 135millions inhabitants – who practically all live in its western portion – dwindle at the amazing rate of -500.000 Russians per year. Beyond the Urals – where more than two/thirds of Russia’s territory lays – you can find barely six millions of Russians today. If -by uneventful chance- you get lost in Siberia, you are most likely to get information by a Chinese (entrepreneur) than a Russian (miner).
Of course power over there still belongs to a bunch of Russian post-perestroika foxes, but the question is: for how long?

With this question in mind, the first main -and supposedly secret- reaction the Russian Government has been able to imagine is an atomic war plan with a -realistic- retreat of Russia’s Might back to the Urals’ line, with the Chinese nowadays ‘ally’ taking over the area. It is true that, after all, history proved China – the engine behind two-thirds of Russia’s amazing growth – quite a problematic counterpart already. Chinese capitals are the most welcome (they’re not tied to annoying EU standards of transparency), Chinese people are necessary (since there’s no one else around), but here fears for a Chinese invasion go well beyond their metaphorical meaning.
Indeed, the other main reaction is instead more immediate and concrete: in the last years a very convincing birth-incentive plan has been put in place. Still, it is hard to expect a few million people to quickly level the ground where just over the border a few hundred millions are potentially ready to resettle.

Russia’s bent toward the West is depicted by its internal migration much more effectively than its official foreign politic. The brand new SCO military alliance will probably work just until Russia will prove to be useful and second China’s interests.
Let’s hope in Confucius wisdom.

* this consideration may lead to the conclusion that the gradual extension of the Russian control over regions of Asia formerly held by populations of different ethnic origin, culture and religion was rather a form of colonization than the progressive formation of the Russian state-entity. In fact, an average time of 400 years of ‘Russification’ of these areas should have been sufficient to promote a sense of national identity which, though, today shows to be quite weak right out of the main urban centers and lacks manifestly alongside most of the Russian borders.

**this besides the communist-era parenthesis, which anyway produced an internal division between ‘the wests’ more than creating an autonomous ‘east’ – which is instead represented by cultures like China, Indochina and Japan.

***besides the Chechen’s chronic crisis

And again, eating. With the eyes. With the mouth. With the nose, a bit less. Being in Naples in these days shows also, in fact, something not in the ‘common imaginary’ – not at least until a year ago or so. The whole world has talked enough already about ‘the problem’ of Naples and its suburbs. Submerged by rubbish. Suffocated by its own garbage.
At a closer look, the show reminds a plot of desperate drama, hyper-titanized worries, factious news and few – very few – reasonable voices. Joining ‘the few’, in the attempt to propose a ‘normalizing view’, I was then seriously slapped by realizing that to restore the real normality back over here, extra-ordinary measures need to be taken this time. Measures that, of the kind of reasonability I came pompously with, have almost nothing in common.

When talking about big cities, common experience tells us that usually there is at least an area where is ‘better not to go’. The absence of it unequivocally makes the distinction between a proper city and a village (or a countryside town, at the most). This is an area you are supposed to know by yourself you shall not free the ‘little adventurous’ that lives in you, thanks to your (hopefully) innate instinct of survival.
In the best cases such an area would be just one, lingering behind a discreet warn coming by close friends or caring hotel concierges when visiting (e.g. Geneva). More commonly, there are at least a couple and they would be reported in tourist guides, branded as ‘potentially dangerous sites’ (e.g. part of NYC’s Harlem district). In the worst cases, those are areas where the State has withdrawn, renouncing to a piece of its territory with the apparent scope to ghettoize the rejections of society and safeguard the others wherever else (sticking with New York City, what has been the almost entire neighborhood of the Bronx for the last six decades or so). Kind of open-air wide-tolerance areas, where (almost) anything is accepted to happen – within its borders and among its ‘components’.
The key-element for the ‘social acceptance’ of these areas is normally one: they have to be small, mostly secluded and sometimes the government should put in at least some fake-try to recover some pieces of it. Sometimes, too, some artist would go living there, eventually become amazingly famous and very possibly die soon afterwards.

With Naples, such key-element is basically reversed. In fact, without considering the waste mismanagement, as a rule the 2/3rds of the city are off-limits for the normal citizen, a figure that could be raised to 4/5ths for the average tourist. Mid-and-upper-bourgeoisies are trenched between a couple of streets and squares in the center and Posillipo*, these areas connected by the promenade avenue – of course congested even at 1am.
Thus, between those areas you can’t go because it’s ‘better not to go’ and those others you’d better not to go because they are invaded by rubbish or shrunk in traffic, there’s not that plenty of space to live in.

On the rubbish side, my local friends keep telling me that ‘it has never been like this’. In their experience, the historical (read: touristic) areas of the city have always been safeguarded at least in their appearance. Rubbish was maybe dropped off a couple of hundred meters away, but ‘the core’ had to stay clean – replicating a kind of Neapolitans’ concept of living that applies to everything: to always show much more and much better than you can actually do. Even if you’re just a muddled trump. Actually, the more you are and the more you tend to show off, in a vicious circle that usually sees broken guys ostentatiously offering dinner for forty people just before vanishing from circulation. Though, this is off the today-topic.
Well, here I am in ‘the core’, at the cross between via Filangeri and via Chiaia. All I can see – and I am not a hygienic-maniac – does definitely not remind a clean scenario: garbage is overflowing trashes almost everywhere, and at the end of both the streets colorful mounds remind to everyone how bad non-diversified trash can smell.

Besides the cleaning, what keeps my mind mumbling is the tie between such distasteful situation and the above ‘better not to go’ areas. By one side, the obvious consideration that to allow criminal organizations to manage and eradicate in whole pieces of the city or in the entirety of the suburbs does not seem a recipe that could produce anything good. By the other, discovering the way these organizations maintain consensus over their crowds has been somewhat shocking.

In fact, being the waste (mis)management a hugely profitable sector for these criminal groups (receiving contributes and reimbursements for the waste disposal – which is of course not done, being trash merely unloaded somewhere else in ‘patrolled’ countryside), they simply react to the State’s awakening over the topic just by proposing a more tempting alternative.
The State offers the construction of incinerators which will be finished who knows when and where you perhaps will have a work paid just a bit more than a misery per month? Look, here’s a 100: would you please go marching against? You get another 100 later.
Managerially speaking, kind of effective: in an area where unemployment and un-education reach percentages of underdeveloped country, criminals ‘own’ the land and the State has been absent for generations… do you really expect anyone to refuse 200 Euros for some protesting?
Here we are, then, with small but theatrical demonstrations (pure joy for medias eager for some show), people chaining themselves to railway lines, women with babies at their arms hysterically crying because their milk is full of dioxide (or whatever): an exquisite fair of fakes inexplicably taken in consideration where it should be known for what it is and ignored by consequence.
Aside this, some WWF foolish excitedly explains (to whichever camera gets close enough) that saving the nests of the ‘crow picchiuto’ is at the moment the real emergency to take care of – in a region collapsing beneath hundreds of thousands of tons of rubbish. As if the crow in question would be happier anyway in some years from now, at conditions unchanged.

Another kind-of-sociological consideration is that, as it is normally supposed to be, Naples has a government rooted in the society that votes for it. So far, being the 2/3rds of the city rooted in criminal environments, what would anyone expect to be elected? Would you then be surprised for real, acknowledging that the situation kept on getting worse for the last fifteen years or so, just to reach the point such rooted collusion between corrupted society and puppet-local-government has lost the control of its same dirty game?

Trying to understand a system does not mean finding reasons to accept it for as it is. That’s what certain self-acquitting southern culture does, reprehensibly. You expose your concerns over a problem that lays a couple of meters from your cup of tea and you get – disconnectedly – responded with the ‘Great Greece’ argument. Yet, when a local government fails in the basic objectives to keep the place it is supposed to govern safe and clean, question arise whether it is actually doing something. Besides countless fairs, parties and expòs – worthless as impossibly expensive.
Quite a long time ago a bunch of law-experts elaborated the so-called ‘principle of subsidiarity’. Such principle provides central government to substitute local whether this shows itself unable to manage situations such emergencies, calamities or other matters excessively thorny for a smaller section of the State.
However you want to classify such dirty-criminal-disaster, it is evident that Naples’ system is not able to self-regenerate from the inside. State’s long inaction over local government’s failure shall be replaced with a gesture showing the concrete will to gain back the control over an area of the Country that common way of speech now simply give it for ‘definitely lost’. A resignation which is intolerable, indeed.
Emergency situations require for emergency procedures. Emergency procedures usually do not take that much into account sophisticated elaborations such as inviolable rights or laws and Constitutional principles at their defense. Emergency procedures are the last call men-of-law – or in love with the law – would ever regard to. Still, even people once very concerned with balance of powers and individual supremacy occasionally admitted certain derogations. Before the rise of the Roman Empire, the Senate used to face crisis by nominating a dictator (that was, literally, the term), whose six-months duty was to set back the order. The army at his disposal, his actions went beyond laws and bureaucracy and no one could oppose him in those fields he had been nominated for. Six months. At the end, to the Senate the burden to ratify his actions, or to deny them by restoring the previous order.
In a country where to ‘take a decision’ is considered the first step towards the tyranny, no one is responsible for problems yet the godfathers of tiny-tiny-little successes are wherever, this is where ‘reasonability’ – and those who used to think themselves reasonable – ends: I can’t find a reason not to consider such an idea attractive.

As far as I can remember, I have always been a convinced supporter of the European Union. Even when this implied, for Italy as for many other countries, the amazing rise of prices following the introduction of the Euro; or when, doing a stage in the Commission, I realized the incredible waste of public money and the astonishing amass of unproductive (and poorly-paid) bureaucracy living in it; despite the constant attempts of France to see and use it as if it is a kind of organic extension of the ‘Hexagone’; regardless of the failure of the referendums for the approval of its painfully-mastodontic Constitution; and even now that, not refraining from acquiring new competencies out of fanciful interpretations of the Treaties’ wording – thought to mean completely different things – suffers of a quite consistent lack of capacity to manage efficiently even those undisputed.

Half Italian and half French, I committed (and still regret) the enormous mistake to think that if I was able to accept all this, there was little that could not be accepted by ‘those others’ European colleagues. Moreover – and most importantly -, if I was able to decline my nationalism in favor of a more ‘mature’ sense of European identity, why people from the rest of the continent shouldn’t do the same? (British obviously excluded).
Such personal vision of things clashed miserably this last week.

After some thirty-hours of fly-stop&jet-lag – plus other four of bumping-jeep and slow-motion-boat away from Manila airport –, I finally reached my destination: dragged out in the middle of the jungle, in a tiny island in the middle of the Philippines Sea, I could now see the resort where two good friends of mine decided to get married. The main characters of this exotic tale are, of course, not autochthones (come on, it would have been way too easy!): the bride is Greek, the groom Danish.

Besides the reasons that brought about a hundred Europeans to assist to a wedding of colleagues on the other side of the world – which could be a good story anyway -, there is something else probably more appropriate to talk about. Let me try to give you the picture.

The crowd that decided to be part of the event was almost equivalent in terms of ‘quantity’. Half of it was Greek, the other half Scandinavian – without considering some irrelevant intrusions such as mine, that one of a Croatian, and an American. What had me impressed first has been that, despite most of them had arrived many days earlier than me (got there just the day before the ‘I do’ part), everything I could see was more about to resemble – say – two different dishes than a modern fusion-pot. Keeping the metaphor, two dishes made of completely different ingredients and out of different cooking. You know, those kinds of platters you really can’t match out of a single meal – ok, maybe now I’m exaggerating a little.
Anyhow, quite soon I also had the chance to understand some of the reasons why this was happening.

By one side, the ‘angels’. Despite not very much into reinvigorating stereotypes, those Scandinavian guys were all indisputably tall, blond, blue-eyed and lovely-smiling, kind of mildly levitating around the intricate jungle-resort. Not the warmest folks, sure say. Easy it was to perceive the delicate though intensive ‘social-scan’ you were put through, before deciding if being conceded of the angelical word.
Perhaps because all ‘coupled’, everyone showed a quite individual attitude. People could get together for dinner time, waterskiing or a small chat, but before and after then everyone managed its own time mostly independently.

By the other side, the Greeks. First, all singles. Then, again not to reinvigorate southern-European stereotypes but how not to notice the constant presence of something to eat or to drink around, in their hands or on the table – any table, anytime. The table, then, the real and main character for almost any kind of activity – from actually eating to organizing anything, relaxing, talking, discussing or just spending time, staying all together (in the Philippines, with around 35 degrees Celsius and 140 per cent of humidity).
But here I hadn’t just ‘Greeks’. I had Cretans – a quite peculiar kind of Greeks, as I had to discover. Fashion-victim and ever-perfect make-up girls, muscular&shaved-bodied guys (and those who were not into the gym-mania were big enough not to need any anyway), this people has been as amazingly warm in welcoming the new arrival (i.e. me) as remarkably fast in closing itself after a formidable barrier: the one and only use of the Greek language. A ‘guilt’ strengthened by the fact that almost every one of them was able to speak good English and those weaker with it were good in Italian or French. Still, no matter the presence of people from other countries (not even the groom, actually), they would always keep on speaking of their own business, in their own language. Some reprimanding-fake-coughing ignored, the sensation of being left aside the conversation started soon, unsurprisingly. Only exceptions? The ground of ‘Greece vs. international clashes’ (what else?). Still, besides – quite obviously – better not to mention the word ‘Macedonia’ with any Greek (which I did, of course, with fairly disastrous results), those Cretan-guys showed me something hard enough to understand. During my short stay I had, in fact, not a few instances of a peculiar kind of Minoan-centrism. Generally speaking, Greek people are usually very proud of their country – with good reasons, of course. Mostly, these reasons are close enough to some of those that allow Italians to be proud of their own country: great history, great minds, great remembers of both. Still, this couldn’t help me not to feel something wrong when one of them – a 27 years old insurance agent – plainly verbalized: ‘I don’t travel that much. This is my first time out of Europe. In the end, my friend, the whole world is coming to Crete, why should I ever leave it?’. Proud support immediately came from another – a lawyer, who got his degree in Italy to come back and exercise the profession in… Heraklio*. I was somewhat daunted. If they were thinking something like that, what was I supposed to think, then? Never to trespass the signal ‘end of Florence’? Forgetting to ever sort out the 8éme arrondissement? Following this ‘Cretan-reasoning’, I was committing a quite consistent offense to myself by leaving my countries, not being satisfied with their rich culture and keep on travelling around the world. ‘My friend’ – the insurance agent unquestionably analyzed – ‘it is evident you have some restlessness and anxiety to heal’.

Back to the nordic side, on the language aspect immediate relief came from the fact that none of the Scandinavians ever dared to talk in Danish or Norwegian in front of somebody that could not understand. Very respectfully, not even between them. With some exceptions, of course.
In fact, here comes a sort of mismatching comparison I would have probably not guessed doing before being at this event. Apparently at least, younger generations of Scandinavians are highly cosmopolitan. They transmit a mature sense of ‘Europeanity’ – the one I feel too, that consideration that there is no alternative solution to the European Union for any of its actual or future members, and that we’re all ‘Europeans’, besides and before our national identity. Nordic-elder-generations, though, showed to be remarkably – and quite embarrassingly – driven by a number of stereotypes at first I believed jokes without taste. Sadly worse, they weren’t. This people are actually still convinced that Southern Europe is a land at best good for tourism. Not enough, for that kind of tourism that resemble more a safari in Africa than a vacation in just another part of the same continent. Prejudices as terrible streets and disgraceful traffic (…), laziness and unproductiveness (!), non-drinkable water (?), diffused misery (?!) or fears for being seized (?!?) plainly flowed out of their mouths (and sometimes you regret having received an education that forces you not to respond in adequate terms to older people). A tough economical-superiority prejudice was evident towards any country not belonging from the hyper-rich&productive ‘north’.
On the Greek side, here comes a ‘reversion of terms’ quite awkward, too. On this front, for instance, while from the elders it was easy to perceive a sense of respect for – say – what has been for more than 30 years the only southern European country with a weight on the world scenario, the young Greeks showed a much more disenchanted vision, using that (terrible) way of speech ‘Italians and Greeks: one face, one race’ just to read it in the way of a nowadays supposed equivalence of the two countries. Towards any non-Greek (or, better, non-Cretan), a slight sense of ‘cultural superiority’ was left mildly rolling on the floor. Sometimes this ’self-sufficiency’ resulted kind of nasty. And actually misplaced. Not few the times in which the terms of reference for the northern colleagues have been not the warmest. Nor the most appropriate.

Of course there were some moments of aggregation. Another Danish-Greek affair even managed to born, actually. Even though, those were definitely too rare sparkles over a quite bleak scenario: the two groups lived their vacations mostly separately, keeping their indifferences, complexes and prejudices throughout the whole stay – and probably more.

Vive l’Union Européenne.

For the sake of transparency, let’s say that such believed ‘mismatch’ happened without my help. Perhaps driven by superficial reasons, I decided I couldn’t help a 72-years-old sir (despite ‘technically immortal’, as his doctor once said) reaching the button-rooms for his third time. Reasoning was simple enough: everyone has his own time in the history; yours is over since quite a while, for me at least.
Such ‘for me at least’ turned out almost to be a ‘for me and some other friends only’, since vote went down quite differently.
Besides the aging-matter, I wasn’t very interested in this whole electoral campaign: once acknowledged that the real economical power has left the country a while ago to land in some office in Brussels, and that most of the rules that are of direct concern of the private citizen are originated by local sources (such as regional or city councils), not much interest remained for those things that cannot be make properly up because of lack of funds (i.e. the pension system) or those others that none of the contenders showed a will of change for (as, for instance, university or health care).
Thus, I assisted to the present elections with a fairly ‘detached’ mood. Good news for me, as said, was that one of the two main contenders was closer to have lived half a century rather than an entire one. Another good news was the simplification of the composition of the so-called ‘parliamentary arch’, being reduced the political parties admitted in it (from around 30 to something like 5). Perhaps this will also mean, sometime in the future (go figure!), a drop of the astonishing number of MP we actually have (around a thousand) and a consistent withdrawal of their – mostly indecent – privileges, which would also be a quite good news.
Of course all these eventual ‘good news’ do not counterbalance much of the economical situation of the country – fairly unhappy, despite not ‘disastrous’ as many picture it.
Anyhow, I do feel such sense of necessary hope that sees the elections’ champ in love enough with the big country that chose him to try turning the ‘unhappy trend’ upside down, with all his efforts.

That is what I think is worth believing in when talking about the elections of your country, no matter the winner.

Beyond the personal approach to the whole election-thing, I was instead somewhat surprised by the posts and replies found on the thread inaugurated by the perhaps-Swedish-lady. Actually, not much by what declared by her; much more instead by the debate that followed.
Some Italians, bees captured by the honey of self-pity, started ‘crying on themselves’ complaining that yes, this was an awful choice that put in ridiculous the whole country (?). Till here, nothing unusual – beside the slight sense of irritation provoked by a reasoning that admits something as ‘normal’ only if it is in line with the ‘what I think’ personal sonata.
What resulted instead quite out of the line was a comment of an English guy (or, at least, someone with a name that sounded like English), which I’m delighted to share here:
‘It is a very sad moment. What is wrong with this country? I am astounded and appalled this criminal is voted in again? When Italy is finally kicked out of the EU maybe the Italian citizens will care about who governs them‘.
I won’t say I was ‘astounded and appalled’ for such idiocy at least in the same way the preference for Mr. Berlusconi of the Italian voters left this guy. Still, what had me quite perplexed was the deep ignorance such bunch of ungrammatical words expressed. 36, to be precise. A couple of lines, 162 characters and a smashing hit of 5 concepts of respect and democratic values to the waste, sacrificed to the altar of the ‘freedom of the expression’. Synthetically said, a good lost chance to keep the mouth shut.
Who instead might have opened his, replying to such absurdity, stayed shut.
That’s why I’m opening mine now, in their name (even if not requested, nor eventually invited to do so). I just need to propose a normalizing view of something that has been pictured so abnormal in the time now many think it is for real. Without realizing that, most of the times, it would be worth remembering first that good jingle ‘nothing bad has happened in your neighboring country that has not been done in yours already’.

First of all, limiting the analysis of the elections of an important western country to ‘sad moment’ and ‘what’s wrong with this country’ says more of the teller than of the supposedly analyzed country. Italian citizens do care of who governs them in a manner that, numerically speaking, almost double the care showed by any northern European democracy: over the 80 per cent of those who had the right to vote decided to exercise it (something that somewhere else, in the north, happens in percentages that do not hit the number 45).
Then again, even without being a Mr. Berlusconi-hooligan, I am still the first to believe that there is no reason in pointing fingers where there is nothing to point at. Mr. Berlusconi is not a criminal: never it has been condemned for any sort of ‘crime’, nor in the legal neither in the broad definition of the word. There have been, in Mr. Berlusconi’s history, charges for corruption of MPs, judges and other relevant administrative figures – plus some financial investigations – all prior to his political career. Despite this does definitely not seem close to the CV of a nun, it is also necessary to see things from a global perspective. This ‘self-picturing-evergreen-guy’ created a huge economical empire rotating over the axis of the media industry in the last 20 years, a period in which nothing else of comparable dimension has been created in any other economic sector of the country (besides banks aggregation). Such period is also the one in which the economic performance of Italy has been much less brilliant than the thirty-years-term of miracle preceding it, and where political immorality started being that pervasive illness that brought then to the ‘fall of the first republic’ (year 1992) under the hammering punches of the judges. The scandals of corruption and bribery out of this Pandora-investigative-vase were thousands. Let’s then be practical: would you really expect that anyone who’s building up an international media enterprise would not ‘accommodate’ into any corrupted system if ‘helpful’ to his interest? If your answer is ‘no’, here’s the reply: I agree with you, but that’s probably why no other industrial giant rose in this time. If your answers is ‘yes’, then I have to admit that is such ‘pragmatic approach’ what most likely made the fortune of Mr. Berlusconi’s entrepreneurial career and his media giant, Fininvest. Anyhow, point is that he didn’t act as the only evil among masses of angels.

In conclusion the Italians – perhaps according also to their supposedly creative nature – privileged a man who pictures himself standing aside the principle of ‘doing’ (even if accompanied with some – say – wide interpretation of the rules) than a younger guy whose working experience outside the political context is somewhat close to zero.
The choice of the Italians, which I do accept as both Italian and democratic, shall be respected also because there’s almost no country, in Europe and abroad, that hasn’t had an even ‘blacker sheep’ than a media tycoon at the main rudder of its political institutions.
In the best cases, even those rare ‘whiter sheep’ had their ‘black moments’. I still remember a hopelessly bold Mrs. Thatcher – just to stick with that apparently-English-guy comment – hypothesizing, out of the blue, not to release anymore the Hong Kong colony back to the Chinese republic, after having resolved the Falkland crisis (basically a bunch of rock-cliffs close to Argentina) with a magnificent parade of the Royal Navy in the middle of the Atlantic sea.
Of course she had to re-state her words a few moments later, with a much different tone.
Vive la real politik.

Still, the journalist expressed an opinion to which masses of Italians would immediately associate with. Beside the ‘greener grass of the neighbour’ way of speech… why?
Being the supposedly French ‘bigger size’ off the desk, the way to ‘picture yourself to the world’ still stands clearly. And here, again, Italy and the Italians show to be the nastiest enemy of themselves.

The word France, still today, keeps immediately recalling vaunting concepts like a sumptuous kingdom, a huge colonial empire, Napoleon, Louis XIV, a UN Security Council Permanent Member. Even concepts as nationalism and chauvinism, or protectionism and statism – despite mostly deprecable – still project a sense of power and self imposition unmatched everywhere else. Quite unpleasant, maybe. Still, pretty powerful. Let’s say it: the French are good image creators and keepers. In fact, would you remember that such a proud and glorious country has been shockingly overwhelmed twice by the German troops within thirty years, and once temporarily divided in two pieces? Or that both of its victories in the world wars have been quite Pyrrus-style? Or would you go thinking that if there was a prize for the most idiot emperor ever, that would fall straight into Napoleon the third’s hands? And that, while playing the ‘master of the continent’ role, France has generated, directly or implicitly, more wars in the history of Europe than any other country? Or, in the end, that just a bunch of months ago the capital, the so-hyper-everything Paris, was practically under siege, crushed in suburbs’ riots?
Of course not. That’s where the magic is: France’s ability to focus on its positive and powerful images and to keep projecting these all over the world (quite often, even too much).

The word Italy, instead, has acquired today a strange taste in the mouth of many people. The sense of magnificence of the Roman Empire, the Florentine Renaissance and the Venetian splendour keeps matching with the positive – yet over-abused – concept of ‘creativity’ (i.e. fashion, design, style, etc.). Though, even the other jewels that would naturally follow (as, for instance, everything connected to the high technological development over engines, telecommunication and a variety of hyper-nano-complicated stuff) get sunk in that stereotyped mantra made of ‘pasta-pizza-mandolino’ now spread over the world. From who? From the same Italians, first and most efficiently: at home as abroad, our behaviour too often gives the perfect idea of where such stereotypes might be taken out from. Then, for instance, also from some Hollywood-guy of Italian origin: they’re rich, they’re famous, they’re all male, they think it’s so-fancy to reconnect to their blood because of some great quality Italian man seem to have… down there. No one seems to realize that such mantra muddles up concepts a good part of which are disagreeable enough – mixing sun, vine, good-food and charm to laziness, disorganization, political instability and corruption: the portrait of decadence.
If Italy wasn’t already the house of three powerful criminal organizations (and an interesting crossroads for some others), such decadence would at least acquire a ‘charming taste of ancient’. If one of its biggest cities wasn’t almost completely out of the control of the State and submerged by rubbish – mostly because one of those criminal organizations is based there -, that sense of decadence wouldn’t smell so badly. If, then, that specific city wasn’t the one from where all the words of the mantra come from, such decay wouldn’t be perceived so strongly all over the civilized world.

Every country has its darker side. Italy has it in its noisiest place.
Here we are, with the perfect recipe to be perceived as the portrait of a paralytic-decadence, despite the rest of the country might behave completely differently.